Deadly Quake Hits Mexico
The military was searching for damage in remote areas of Mexico Wednesday morning, hours after a powerful earthquake killed at least 23 people, collapsed dozens of houses and left the worst-hit state shrouded in darkness with power outages.
CBS News Correspondent Melissa McDermott reports experts expect the death toll to rise.
The quake struck at 8:07 p.m. Tuesday in Colima, a small state that includes the port city of Manzanillo, about 300 miles west of Mexico City.
Emergency crews surveyed the full extent of the damage hours after the ground had stopped shaking. Adan de la Paz of the Mexican Red Cross said 21 people had died in Colima, a small state about 300 miles west of Mexico City, and two others were killed in the neighboring state of Jalisco.
Mexico's national seismological service put the quake's magnitude at 7.6, but the U.S. Geological Survey calculated it at 7.8.
"Because of the size of the earthquake and its shallow depth, USGS is expecting substantial damage," said U.S. Geological Survey spokesman Butch Kinerney.
In Mexico City, police say people ran into the street in panic when the ground started rolling, but the only real damage came in the form of power outages.
It is a much different story in Colima, where damage is extensive and widespread.
Colima Gov. Fernando Moreno Pena said 19 people were killed, nine in the capital city of Colima and 10 others elsewhere in his state. He did not provide details, but radio reports said most of the victims died after portions of office and residential buildings collapsed near the center of Colima City.
Nearly all of the state remained without electricity and phone service early Wednesday, Moreno Pena said.
Melchor Usua Quiroz, head of the state's civil defense authorities, told the government news agency Notimex that the quake damaged homes and businesses and briefly left several people trapped in elevators across Colima.
There is also major damage in Mexico's second largest city. Authorities in Guadalajara say the quake destroyed more than 40 homes, leaving over 100 people homeless.
An 85-year-old woman in the town of Zapotitlan died after she rushed out of her house and was crushed by a falling security wall that had ringed her yard. A 1-year-old girl also died in Zapotitlan, but the circumstances surrounding her death remained unclear, authorities said early Wednesday.
President Vicente Fox ordered the military to search for damage near the quake's epicenter, a region that included remote villages in coastal areas of Jalisco and Colima.
Seismologists at the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado say the area sits on a hot bed of activity.
"This part of the coast of Mexico is along the boundary between the Coco's plate and the North American plate and as the Coco's plate slides in against North America, it collides and slides under it and it's that collision that's causing that earthquake along the coast of Mexicom," said the Center's Bruce Presgrave. "It is a very active zone."
Some earthquakes of magnitude 7 have caused massive damage, but the effect of a quake can be affected by many factors, including its depth and the sort of earth through which it passes as it moves away from the epicenter.
Mexico City is built atop a former lake bed in a mountain valley that acts as a sort of amplifier for the motion of quakes.
The last substantial earthquake in the Colima area was in 1995. It registered 8.0 magnitude and killed 49 people. At least 100 people were injured in that quake, which was a little northwest of Tuesday's earthquake.